Urban Data Acquisition Projects in Vr

Polo, returning from his travels, encounters Kublai Khan. It's the end of the day, near the end of the great Khan's life, and perhaps at the end of his empire. Marco Polo tells of the cities he visited while traveling the far-flung empire. Each one is fantastic and is described in a short fable, so the whole story takes on the quality of a folktale constructed around a series of adventures. The reader can't be sure whether these cities actually exist or whether they are an illusion in Marco Polo's or the Khan's mind. We are now faced with the possibility and, in some cases, the results of acquiring accurate digital representations of our cities. But these cities will be just as invisible as Marco Polo's unless we meet some fundamental challenges. The first challenge is to take data from multiple sources, which are often accurate but incomplete, and weave them together into comprehensive models. Because of the size and extent of the data that we can now obtain, this modeling task is daunting and must be accomplished in a semiautomated manner. Once we have comprehensive models, and especially if we can build them rapidly and extend them at will, the next question is what to do with them. Thus, the second challenge is making the models visible. In particular, they must be made interactively visible so users can explore, inspect, and analyze them. In this article, we discuss the nature of the acquired data and how we're beginning to meet these challenges and produce visually navigable models. We've developed 3D City, a semiautomated system that supports human intervention at key points to meet the challenge of constructing complete and extended urban models from several data sources. We've already built virtual environments (VEs) for urban planning and emergency response using 3D City. Once we've met the challenges of urban construction and visualization, possible applications include education , urban planning, emergency response, tourism and entertainment, military operations, traffic management, construction (especially large-scale projects), various geolocated and mobile services, citizen–government relations (when complex civic projects are vetted), and games based on real locations. For example, large-scale urban projects now require coordinated efforts by affected neighborhood groups; the business community; and city, state, and federal governments. Collecting data and mod-eling a city as it is creates a foundation for inserting new structures, bridges, and roads. We can provide different constituencies with interactive visualizations …